Culture

Category archives for Culture

Last week, I asked on twitter, and then on the blog, about peoples’ preferences for listening to music while doing various types of sciencey work, and conducted an informal survey. Today I’ll give you the (entirely unscientific) results, and in a few days I’ll share what research has to say about music and work productivity.

What is culture? One simple definition might be: a distinctive behavior shared by two or more individuals, which persists over time, and that ignorant individuals acquire through socially-aided learning. There are at least four different ways to learn a particular behavior or problem-solving strategy. That is to say, there are four different ways to learn.…

Do animals create art? So far, this seems a uniquely human ability. But do animals have a sense of the aesthetically pleasing? What about the ability to judge and critique art? Can an animal decide if a given work of art is beautiful or ugly? What is beauty in the first place? All good questions.…